“Can you help me fix stupid?”
Perhaps such a line makes you laugh. I admit there is a degree of relatability to it. Maybe you’re thinking about a time when you observed someone doing the opposite of what they were told to do, what they were expected to do, or what would be in line with the concept of “common sense.” In this same observational period, you also witnessed the consequences of such an action. If those consequences weren’t catastrophic, your expression became that of a wry smile, a shaken head, and maybe you muttered “I told you so,” or something to that effect. Maybe you also had the same expression if the consequences were catastrophic, in which case I recommend immediate screening for psychopathy.
For me, such a line makes my blood boil.
We really are entering a new age in how we understand maturity within organizations. In 2024, Avetta® announced a partnership with the National Safety Council (NSC) to launch what’s called the Safety Maturity Index™ (SMI) (NSC, 2024). This tool was designed to quantify the maturity of contractors’ safety management systems based on factors such as leadership and structure, how they identify and control hazards, how they ensure workers are competent, how they manage and respond to incidents, and how their continuous improvement processes are built. It is a sound method for scoring something that has traditionally been a guessing game (and an example of what we are trying to do with this book).
As a young safety consultant, though, servicing all types and sizes of organizations across many industries, I didn’t have such great tools for quantifying the safety journey. Sure, I could measure compliance, but if I really wanted to know a client’s definition of safety, their approach, and their receptiveness to new ideas, I really had to rely on the conversation and my own gut intuition. However, there was always one line that came in response to “How can I help you, today?” that explained everything about the state of safety in an organization.
“Can you help me fix stupid?”
Now, I did say this question makes my blood boil, and that’s true. But I also felt quite the sense of relief when I heard it. For me, there was no guessing at that point. I knew everything I needed to know to move forward. “Can you help me fix stupid?” is one of the easiest and most descriptive qualitative indicators of an organization’s current safety maturity level. It tells me everything.
It tells me they have no meaningful metrics.
It tells me they have no proven KPIs.
It tells me they are likely heavily dependent on administrative controls, like training and policies.
It tells me they have many assumptions about what will shape knowledge and behavior.
It tells me they have nothing to measure the validity of those assumptions.
It tells me the only thing they have visibility to is when human error inevitably occurs and something goes wrong.
It tells me they are entirely dependent on that human error not happening, but they have not implemented the controls or performance metrics that allow for human error to occur without causing catastrophe.
Now, here’s the fun part. Organizations and industries do evolve and mature in their approaches to occupational safety and health over time. So too has the safety profession itself, and almost without fail, those evolutions mirror each other almost identically, even if on different timelines. We start with compliance. When we figure out that human behavior seems to interfere with staying compliant, we discover this concept called behavior-based safety (BBS). When BBS devolves (hold that thought, we’re not done with BBS) into blame, and we hypothesize that blame doesn’t work, someone comes along with something called human and organizational performance (HOP), or resilient safety, or safety differently, or something else really fancy that promises to be the next step toward really fixing things. Progress really starts to slow down at this point, maybe even plateau, but we continue playing around with HOP and preaching the good word while never quite figuring out how to fully operationalize it. In the meantime, we discover that people are still being seriously injured, even killed, at work, and we immediately latch onto SIF prevention. Then, if we really consider ourselves progressive, we get involved in benchmarking and thought leadership discussions, still looking for that silver bullet to make these concepts work, but also not wanting to miss the next buzzword as soon as it launches.
While there probably isn’t a single peer-reviewed study charting this exact progression, this is the undeniable reality of the safety maturity journey. It is the roadmap I have observed across hundreds of organizations. Someone reading this is looking really smug because they started somewhere in the latter half of that journey and have always been ahead of the game. That’s fine, bro, calm down. Yes, this is my story, and a story is not science. We’re getting to that part.
So, in this chapter, we are going to take a critical look at that journey and each step in the process. We’ll discuss some of these abstract concepts you may have heard before. What we won’t do is fully subscribe to nor fully dismiss any one of them. To start, let’s quickly compare the two main concepts of Safety-I and Safety-II.